Additional context:
Native speakers of my mother tongue do not all understand each other due to some pretty extreme dialects. Now that I’m in Europe, I’ve noticed multiple instances of people sometimes not understand the dialect of someone from a village 10-20 km away…
In contrast, for example most American, British, and Australian people can just… understand each other like that?? I never thought much about it before but it’s pretty incredible
Edit: thanks everyone, and clearly I didn’t think of certain parts of the UK when I was in the shower and thought of this…
I remember having to interpret for my boyfriend when we drove through the Western end of Virginia. The accents get thick out in Appalachia. We’re both native speakers, he’s even from Virginia, but by the coast.
me and my wife have this dynamic. i’m from southern appalachia and she cannot understand the shanendoah or allegheny accent at all. if i say something particularly idiomatic she’ll ask me what i mean because our verb syntaxes carry a little extra information AND we have tonals